The Washington book How to read politics and politicians

Politicians are all too often hard to truly parse, despite the fact that they spend almost every waking hour trying to communicate their agendas. Lozada has, for several decades now, made it his job to enable the public to better understand politicians, who they are, what they really stand for, and what they're really saying. To that end, he has put together a collection of his columns that have appeared for the last couple of decades in the Washington Post and the New York Times. His focus is to analyze nationally prominent politicians' written words, mostly via books, sometimes speeches. He analyzes a lot of presidents, obviously--Biden, Trump, Obama, Bush--but other movers and shakers too, like Dick Cheney and Hilary Clinton. He digs past the obvious and the superficial into the nuance and true meaning underneath. More than just providing analysis, Lozada is willing to lay out criticisms up and down the political spectrum. His insights are piquant and enlightening, the result being an enhanced understanding of the complicated mess that is American politics.

An insider's account of the nation's capital based on the political literature surrounding it. As a Pulitzer Prize--winning book critic, Lozada collects observations on the countless books he's inhaled concerning the city's power politics. "Not just masochism--transcendent masochism," he writes, gamely. "That's what people think it is like to read political books." Nonetheless, most people want to know what these books say, even if they're written by people far down the pecking order. They're not interested in the quality of the work so much as the news that the books contain. Lozada is admirably evenhanded: He shakes his head at Mike Pence's ability to find excuses for the boss who wasn't troubled by the prospect of him being hanged in front of the Capitol, just as much as he bemoans Kamala Harris' "eagerness to stay on both sides of difficult questions." Not content to read everything ever committed to print on Reagan, Clinton, and their fellow denizens of the Oval Office, Lozada wishes for books that don't exist, such as a memoir by George H.W. Bush. "Perhaps he feared that his difficulties articulating a vision in speeches would recur on the page," he ventures, while allowing that the lack of such a book makes the record incomplete. The books of Washington reveal a lot, whether Obama's early obnoxiousness, tempered in later years by a welcome gravitas; Trump's braying self-regard, which is no news to anyone but still annoys, even in the form of a précis; or the theorizing of scholars such as the well-known Samuel Huntington and the less well-known Albert O. Hirschman. The author's audience is self-selecting, but they'll be well served by his catholic survey. Those who like to read about national politics will be rewarded, and even entertained, by Lozada's pages. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.